Tucker Carlson takes on the media

2/13/12 12:30 PM EST

The top editors at The Daily Caller have come out with the first in a series of articles about the liberal media watchdog Media Matters For America, and in doing so they have suggested that MSNBC and reporters from The Washington Post, POLITICO, The Huffington Post and elsewhere have served as dumping grounds or willing surrogates for MMFA's research.

But in making this allegation, Carlson, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller, and Vince Coglianese, the senior online editor, do not cite specific examples to back it up. And reached by phone this morning, Carlson suggested that he did not need to cite specific examples because the charges against the reporters were being made by staffers at MMFA, not by The Daily Caller.

"The charge is not our charge," Carlson explained. "The charge is being made by employees at Media Matters, who would know. This is not an editorial, it is reporting that we did out of which came the claim that we wrote in the story. I can't add to what they've already told us."

Yet email correspondence between Carlson and BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, one of the reporters targeted in the article (and my former boss), shows that Carlson is very willing to make the same charge made by his anonymous sources.

In the piece that was published last night, Carlson and Coglianese write that in its campaign against Fox News and other non-liberal media outlets, Media Matters — founded by David Brock, the principal target of the piece — has "perhaps achieved more influence simply by putting its talking points into the willing hands of liberal journalists.”

“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”

“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at The Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”

“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”

Smith, who refused to comment on the substance of these claims, later took to Twitter to say that he has been critical of Media Matters.

The sources above include — at most — one Media Matters staffer, one former Media Matters staffer, and a third "with firsthand knowledge," none of whom agreed to go on the record. In publishing those quotes without providing evidence, the Daily Caller has put accusations on the public record regardless of whether or not they carry any weight.

"There are many examples of these guys using Media Matters' material," Carlson said in his defense, "but we're not printing some media analyst's take on Greg Sargent's or Ben Smith's reporting. We're talking to the people who fed them material."

If those reporters have any complaints, Carlson added, "their complaints would be with those sources at Media Matters. They sould go ahead and call and complain about it."

But Carlson's own feelings about these reporters' relationship to Media Matters falls very much in line with that of the anonymous sources.

In an unsolicited email to Smith, who is also a weekly contributor to POLITICO, Carlson wrote:

It was interesting to hear how contemptuous the Media Matters people are of you. It's not your politics — you all are on the same page of course — but the fact you're a stenographer. Even they don't respect that.

"Don't get the nasty private email thing," Smith wrote back to Carlson. "You guys going to pass on the Israel angle entirely?" he added, a reference to a recent POLITICO article by Smith about a rift between the White House and Media Matters. The piece, which suggested that MMFA had gone way outside of the mainstream in its stance on Israel, was a huge source of frustration for the watchdog group, and Smith seemed to offer it as evidence that he was not on MMFA's side, as Carlson's article suggested.

"You started the nasty private email thing with my reporters," Carlson wrote back. "Seems like the Israel thing has been pretty well covered."

In fact, Smith was the first reporter to bring the Israel story to light, and it has since produced followups from conservative and mainstream media organizations. And in regard to the email correspondence, Smith had followed up on a call with a Daily Caller reporter with the following:

Thanks for calling, best of luck with the story. I do have a quote, which is also the truth:

"Because The Daily Caller has made specific mistakes about me and refused to correct them in the past, I'm afraid I'm not comfortable speaking to you about this."

The Daily Caller did not publish Smith's quote in it's piece, though Carlson has asked that if I publish his correspondence with Smith, I quote him in full.

From Carlson:

We caught Ben acting as David Brock's press agent, and he's embarrassed. He should be.